The
POETRY
Metaphysical
Poets
John Donne • Andrew Marvell and George Herbert
Read by Nicholas Boulton • Jonathan Keeble and others
Including works by
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
John Donne (1572–1631)
Read by Geoffrey Whitehead and Will Keen
The Anniversary *
The Good Morrow *
The Sun Rising +
The Canonisation +
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning *
A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day *
The Flea +
The Relic +
George Herbert (1593–1633)
Read by Jonathan Keeble
9 The Collar 10 Redemption
11 Love I
12 Love II 13 Love III 14 Jordan I 15 Jordan II 16 The Pearl 17 The Flower 2:01
1:30
1:56
2:33
2:01
2:51
1:57
1:51
0:53
1:01
1:02
1:06
1:01
1:14
2:40
2:36
* Read by Geoffrey Whitehead
+ Read by Will Keen
2
Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
Read by Nicholas Boulton
18 To His Coy Mistress
19 The Coronet 20 The Definition of Love 21 The Garden 22 On a Drop of Dew 2:49
1:39
1:51
4:06
2:12
Henry Vaughan (1621–1695)
Read by Roy McMillan
23 The Retreat 24 The World 25 They Are All Gone Into the World of Light Richard Crashaw (1613–1649)
Read by Nicholas Boulton
26 To His (Supposed) Mistress 27 To Our Lord, Upon the Water Made Wine
1:50
3:27
2:19
Thomas Carew (1595–1640)
Read by Nicholas Boulton
28 Mediocrity in Love Rejected – 29 To a Lady That Desired I Would Love Her
30 The Spring 5:32
3
1:00
1:59
1:41
Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648)
Read by Roy McMillan
31 Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury – To His Watch… Francis Quarles (1592–1644)
Read by Jonathan Keeble
32 Hoc Ego Versiculos 33 On Time 34 On the World 0:57
1:26
0:48
0:26
Katherine Philips (1632–1664)
Read by Laura Paton
35 Against Love 0:59
John Hall (1627–1656)
Read by Nicholas Boulton
36 John Hall – On an Hourglass 3:26
Thomas Traherne (1636–1674)
Read by Jonathan Keeble
37 Thomas Traherne – Shadows in the Water Richard Lovelace (1618–1657)
Read by Nicholas Boulton
38 To Lucasta, Going to the Wars 39 The Scrutiny 3:42
0:44
1:08
4
Sir William Davenant (1606–1668)
Read by Nicholas Boulton
40 Aubade The Lark Now Leaves… 0:55
Sir John Suckling (1609–1642)
Read by Nicholas Boulton
41 Sir John Suckling – Of Thee, Kind Boy, I Ask No Red and White 42 Out Upon It, I Have Lov’d Edmund Waller (1606–1687)
Read by Jonathan Keeble
43 Edmund Waller – Of the Last Verses in the Book 1:21
0:49
1:21
Total time: 79:31
Credits
Recorded at Motivation Sound Studios, London
Edited and mastered by Sarah Butcher
© Booklet: Naxos AudioBooks Ltd 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. UNAUTHORISED PUBLIC PERFORMANCE, BROADCASTING AND
COPYING OF THESE COMPACT DISCS PROHIBITED.
Cover picture: Still Life with a Skull by Letellier (fl.1668–94); courtesy of the
Bridgeman Art Library.
5
The Metaphysical Poets
About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a
race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets … who
were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole
endeavour … The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence
together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons,
and allusions; their learning instructs and their subtlety surprises;
but the reader, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
in the early twentieth century, when the
Metaphysicals came to be recognised as
daring, experimental poets, who blended
thought and feeling in an exciting way, a
way that was new to its own time, and
new once again in the modern age. In the
romantic era, Coleridge had complained
that Donne had ‘Wreathed iron pokers
into true-love knots.’
Donne’s poetry laid the ground rules
for Metaphysical verse, and the essence of
what he was trying to do was to find an
intellectual language that would link the
physical world with the abstract or spiritual
world. The method that he devised was to
force radically dissimilar ideas and images
together. A classic example is the poem
So wrote the great Doctor Johnson in
1779, and his words are still a valid
summary of what we understand by
‘the metaphysical poets’, led by John
Donne, and including George Herbert,
Richard Crashaw, Thomas Carew, and
Andrew Marvell. Johnson was using
the word metaphysical not in any strict
philosophical sense, but to indicate that
these poets explored subtle and complex
ideas and imagery. What has changed
since Johnson is his final judgement that
readers were not pleased by these poets:
at the time he was undoubtedly correct,
and for the next century and more, Donne
and his school were seen as difficult, cold,
unemotional writers. All that changed
6
other characteristic of this verse is that
it usually remained unpublished in the
writer’s lifetime. Sometimes the poems
were circulated informally in manuscripts,
but for most of these writers poetry
remained a purely private activity, a
private exploration of their true inner
world, perhaps to be shared with friends,
then gathered and published after their
deaths. Donne’s poetry was published by
his son in 1633, two years after the poet’s
death. In the same year George Herbert,
who was also a priest, died and left his
manuscripts to a friend, with instructions
to burn them or publish as he thought fit.
Herbert described his poetry as ‘A picture
of the many spiritual conflicts that have
passed between God and my soul.’ The
carnality of Donne is absent, but Herbert
employs radically new images to record
the stages of his relationship to his God,
a relationship ranging from despair to
devotion, from rebellion to bliss. Henry
Vaughan wrote secular verse before
undergoing a religious conversion and
turning to devotional poetry full of images
of dawn, light, spring and regeneration.
Unusually, Vaughan’s work was published
‘The Flea’, where the writer complains
that his beloved will not consummate
their love; and yet, he argues, they are
already married, made one flesh, through
a flea which has bitten them both and
sucked their blood and thus mingled their
beings within his tiny body. The flea is not
an image in any normal poetic sense, but
a vehicle for subtle, intellectual argument.
It is as though Donne had decided to rewrite the conventional love poetry of the
Elizabethan songbird-poets, with their
emotive, rhetorical praise of feminine
beauty. Donne’s poetry was of two
distinct types: the carnal, intellectualised
love poetry written as a young man, and
the profound devotional verse, composed
after he had taken holy orders; yet here
too he employed intellectual imagery,
conceits, and paradox, as when he
proclaims that he can never be free until
God enthrals him, never chaste until God
ravishes him.
Carnal love and religious faith are
the two great themes of all metaphysical
verse, although usually they come from
different writers, not from one writer
with two distinct voices like Donne. The
7
exile in Rome, becoming the only English
poet of the European Baroque school.
He wrote highly-coloured and crafted,
sumptuous, devotional poetry, evoking
the spiritual love of God through carnal
imagery. One of his contemporaries called
Crashaw ‘a very bird of paradise.’ Women
who wished to be taken seriously as
poets had a hard time in the seventeenth
century, but Katherine Philips succeeded
in establishing a reputation for wit
and learning in the metaphysical style,
combined with poetic grace. Known at
first only to a private circle of friends, her
works were published shortly before her
death in 1664. Francis Quarles added a
new dimension to poetry by illustrating his
work with ‘emblems’ – symbolic pictures
which drove home the message of each
poem through the use of visual codes. His
poetry is not exactly exalted, but through
these emblems he created for himself a
permanent niche in the history of English
verse.
The last Metaphysical was Andrew
Marvell, born only a few years after
Shakespeare’s death, and living well into
the Reformation era. He was a scholar,
in his own lifetime, while that of another
devotional poet, Thomas Traherne,
remained entirely unknown for two
centuries. When they were discovered, his
writings, radiant with visionary innocence
and intensity, were at first attributed to
Vaughan.
The carnality of Donne was taken
to extreme, sensual heights by Thomas
Carew, who wrote an elaborate and
adoring elegy on Donne, saying that he
had been ‘First Apollo’s priest then God’s.’
Carew was a scholar and diplomat,
a royalist and a great favourite in the
court of Charles I. His verse, published
posthumously, is witty, but less cerebral
than Donne’s, and full of polished
eroticism. Sir John Suckling and Richard
Lovelace were men of action: soldiers,
lovers, and poets who both blended
something of Donne’s intellectual wit with
the heroic sentiments of the Cavalier, and
with more conventional praises of the
beloved. Both had rather lurid reputations
as libertines.
Richard Crashaw was a unique figure:
born of a Puritan family, but became a
Roman Catholic, and lived in self-imposed
8
different ways explored the boundaries
of the physical and the spiritual; but now
their works were condemned to sleep and
darkness, waiting to be awakened more
than two centuries later by a new age that
was ready for their subtlety and power.
diplomat and politician, and another who
wrote only for his private pleasure. After
his death his poems were published by
a woman who claimed to be his wife,
but whom everyone believed to be his
housekeeper and his mistress. In all of his
output there is just one perfect poem, ‘To
his Coy Mistress’, a love-persuasion poem
on the theme of carpe diem – ‘seize the
time’ or ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye
may.’. One of the most famous poems
in the language, it is an irresistible blend
of music and thought, of sensuousness
and wit, of frivolity and seriousness. In
‘A Dialogue between the Soul and the
Body,’ Marvell wrote as Donne’s true heir,
and the culmination of the metaphysical
tradition; elsewhere he wrote gracefully
and with candid humour of the love he
felt for a twelve-year-old girl.
Marvell died in 1678, in the age
of Dryden and neo-classicism; spiritual
passion or reflection, dialogues between
soul and body, the application of the
intellect to love or to religious devotion,
were all now unwanted. The metaphysical
style had seen the flowering of half a
dozen poets of genius who had in their
Notes by Peter Whitfield
9
Nicholas Boulton studied at the Guildhall School of Music and
Drama, winning the BBC Carleton Hobbs Award for Radio in 1993.
Since then he has been heard in numerous productions for BBC
Radio 4 and the World Service. Work for Naxos AudioBooks includes
Cecil in Lady Windermere’s Fan and most recently David Copperfield
and Ancient Egypt – The Glory of the Pharaohs. Film work includes
Shakespeare in Love and Topsy Turvy. Theatre credits include Platonov
for the Almeida, Henry V for the RSC and Arcadia for the Theatre
Royal Haymarket.
Jonathan Keeble combines his audio work with a busy theatre and
TV career. He has featured in over 500 radio plays for the BBC, from
Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes. He also played the evil Owen in The
Archers. Much in demand for his voicework, this ranges from the audio
guide for the Sistine Chapel to voicing the Angel of Death in the film
Hellboy 2. An award-winning reader, Jonathan has recorded over 100
audiobooks.
Will Keen’s theatre credits include The Duchess of Malfi, The Tempest,
Antigone and Dido, Queen of Carthage, as well as playing the title role
in Macbeth and De Flores in The Changeling, both directed by Declan
Donnellan. His television credits include Foyle’s War, Wired, Casualty
1907, The Colour of Magic, Holby City, Murphy’s Law and The Bill.
10
Roy McMillan is a director, writer, actor and abridger. For Naxos
AudioBooks he has read The Body Snatcher and Other Stories, Bulldog
Drummond, The French Revolution – In a Nutshell, Cathedrals –­ In a
Nutshell and the introductions to works by Nietzsche and the Ancient
Greeks. He has directed readings of Hardy, Hopkins, Kipling, Milton and
Blake; Austen, Murakami, Conrad and Bulgakov, among many others;
and has written podcasts and sleevenotes, as well as biographies of
Milton and Poe. He has also directed plays for BBC Radio 3 and 4.
Laura Paton trained at LAMDA where she won the St. Phillip’s Prize
for Poetry and the Michael Warre Award. She has toured the UK extensively in productions as varied as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and
Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Other recordings for Naxos AudioBooks include
Orlando, Anna Karenina and Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
Geoffrey Whitehead trained at RADA. His theatre credits include
Alan Ayckbourn’s Three Men in a Boat, the role of Bassanio in
The Merchant of Venice at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Ivor
Fish in Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing, Polonius in Hamlet at the
Norwich Playhouse, as well as appearing in Henry V, A Midsomer
Night’s Dream, Othello and King Lear in Stratford and London.
His television credits include Z Cars, Upstairs Downstairs, The
Sweeney, Poirot, Young Indiana Jones, Midsommer Murders and
Little Britain.
11
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12
The Metaphysical
Poets
POETRY
UNABRIDGED
John Donne • Andrew Marvell
and George Herbert
Read by Nicholas Boulton • Jonathan Keeble and others
Including works by
John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Thomas Carew and
Henry Vaughan: these were some of the seventeenth-century writers
who devised a new form of poetry full of wit, intellect and grace,
which we now call Metaphysical poetry. They wrote about their
deepest religious feelings and their carnal pleasures in a way that
was radically new and challenging to their readers. Their work was
largely misunderstood or ignored for two centuries, until twentiethcentury critics rediscovered it, finding in it a deep originality and a
willingness to experiment that made much conventional poetry look
merely decorative. This collection provides the perfect introduction to
this diverse group of fascinating poets.
View our catalogue online at
www.naxosaudiobooks.com
p 2012 Naxos AudioBooks Ltd.
© 2012 Naxos
AudioBooks Ltd.
Made in Austria.
Total time
79:31
NA0089D
CD ISBN:
9781843795926